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Month: May 2014

Every CMO of every organization needs to understand context and how to leverage it to benefit their customers and their balance sheet. Context goes far beyond location and Robert Scoble did an excellent job of providing real examples of value derived from situations I will call contextual marketing in his keynote at AWE 2014.

Among other things, Scoble points out five trends enabling contextual understanding:

1) Sensors

2) Wearables

3) Location

4) Social

5) Data

Both Dewy Decimal-esque 3×5 card customer tracking in the old days and technology enabled contextual understanding of customers today help marketers deliver the right the right message to the right person at the right time brings the greatest value to both the buyer and the seller of goods or services, a pointI make hereregardingContextMandProxToMe.

Of course all of this ties in to my mantra “Don’t work for technology; make technology work for you.” because marketers who use technologies that leverage context to deliver the most value to their customers are certainly putting technology to work for the marketing dollars under their jurisdiction.

I love sitting down with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and hearing what they are up to. The conversations usually goes well beyond what is on their website because they’re either in ‘stealth mode’ or too busy changing the world to worry about keeping a website 100% up to date. Their determination to change the word with technology doing new and amazing things for you is absolutely exciting. Carlo Capello, CEO of ProxToMe is no exception.

I met Carlo at Silicon Valley’s 2014 Italian Innovation Day and have had the opportunity to chat with him about a wide range of topics as well as to see him pitch (his was one of the 55 Plug and Play pitches I write about here). Carlo has positioned ProxToMe as a Proximity-as-a-Service solution for proximity based interaction. What that means to B2C and even B2B CMOs is that using ProxToMe’s patented technology, businesses with mobile apps can first recognize and then share content with customers based on proximity to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLTE) beacons.

Carlo and his team began working with BTLE before Apple’s iBeacon move. Now that essentially every iPhone is a beacon, ProxToMe’s solution and expertise in this domain mean amazing things for their customers. “We do for offline businesses what Amazon does online. We let our clients learn more about their customers shopping habits and provide a new direct channel to influence what they buy,” Carlo says.

ProxToMe provides brands and retailers a full hardware and software solution comprised of Bluetooth tags and a mobile SDK (software development kit for my marketing friends). This way the brand maintains control of the in-app experience and can leverage all of the insight they may have with respect to a particular customer at the point in time they approach a beacon.

Ben Davis from Econsultancy makes the point, “Retail apps still have their place in a mobile optimized world, but they’re increasingly characterized as devices for customer retention.” ProxToMe helps avoid that characterization by generating customer involvement based on location, a form of context.

With contextually intelligent systems such as those offered by ContextM, the ProxToMe solution becomes even more powerful because it brings the ability to not only send messages to customers in the store but to send the right message in store, a message that will increase wallet share and improve customer retention and engagement.

While we are a long way from creating Rosie from The Jetsons, robots are doing more and more complex tasks and I’ll touch on some of those robots here. First, though, I have to point out that when a robot is doing something for you, whether in industrial or personal contexts, it creates value and falls right in line with my mantra: Don’t work for technology; make technology work for you. I’m not the only one who thinks like this; Venture capitalists are investing in robotics technologies in many areas including industrial, agricultural, medical, defense, security and personal robotics.

Grishin Robotics, a company dedicated entirely to investment in consumer robotics, invested in Double Robotics which provides an innovative solution for telepresence. Double Robotics has several legitimate use cases, including use in schools in remote locations as implemented in Alaska’s Kodiak Island Borough School District.

Lux Capital is another venture capitalist with a mechanical eye for robotics. Peter Hebert, one of the Lux Capital co-founders, will participate in the VLAB panel. Lux Capital invested in robotics company CyPhy Works who claims “The very best way to empower people with robotic technologies is to make them accessible, reliable, and practical.” I couldn’t agree more! CyPhy Works has created two robots, EASE, a hovering robot used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and PARC, a self-flying robot with secure communication and high definition reconnaissance video capabilities.

While myself, a few loyal VLAB fans, some venture capitalists and all entrepreneurs whose dreams were enriched by The Jetsons have an interest in robotics, there is ongoing debate about whether robotics is affecting the labor markets. Most of this comes from incorrectly linking the lackluster jobs market with improvements in manufacturing. You can read more about this issue here.

Politics and economics aside, robots are doing great things and some of them are actually getting cute about it.

Aldebaran created a friendly little robot called NAO who recognizes and communicates with you while moving around your home. If you knock NAO over, don’t worry NAO can stand back up but watch out as you might be chided for not being careful! NAO also has a big brother, Romeo developed by Alderbaran.

While these robots may look like toys, they can actually perform meaningful services for people, especially the disabled. Other robotics companies are also creating robots that serve a real purpose. Knightscope, whose robot I’ve seen rolling around the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA, aims to combine autonomous robots, predictive analytics and community engagement to reduce crime.

Much of the development in robotics is being further enabled by standards and development frameworks. One example is ROS, the open source Robot Operating System originally developed by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and now under stewardship of the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

The number of robots using ROS is increasing and includes the UBR-1 created by Unbounded Robotics, a company with the mission to develop robots that are both advanced and affordable for robotics researchers. UBR-1 is a one-armed robot cram packed with cameras, microphones, and sensors that are ROS integrated. Melonee Wise, CEO and founder of Unbounded Robotics, will participate in the upcoming Robotics 2.o VLAB event.

The UBR-1 is one of many robots capable of doing amazing things. Honda’s Asimo can run, jump and hop on one foot as well as open a thermos, pour a cup of juice and serve it. Asimo even kicked a soccer ball around with US President Barak Obama.

The sporting skills of robots do not stop with soccer. The Swiss Federal Institute Of Technology has developed a robot with an arm that can catch objects with different shapes and trajectories by reacting in less than five hundredths of a second. I can’t even do that consistently!

I will leave to your imaginations whether or not robotic sports teams will exist in the future and simply say the future of robotics is closer than most people understand. After kicking around the soccer ball, Asimo told President Obama, “I keep training every day so that some day in the future I can help people in their home.” Robots lending a hand in the home sounds like technology working for you.